I will discourage wagering among the ghouls, but I’m telling you that Dick Cheney looks like he’s about to croak. Have you seen his pressers lately? Between sentences he is laboring for breath and interrupting himself to partake of coughing jags. This world tour of his to promote waterboarding isn’t about national security – this is about Dick doing damage control immediately, to keep Dubya from blaming him for everything when he’s dead.
David Letterman seems to be thinking the same thing. Here’s a clip of Dave riffing on Dick’s labored breathing.
Ok, but in all seriousness? I listened to about nine minutes of his speech on May 21st. Between every sentence Dick is reaching hard for air. Clearing his throat. Coughing now and then. I thought about his health history and his notoriously bad heart.
Dick has been very outspoken against the Obama administration in the past few months. It used to be that members of a former presidential administration reserved their criticism of new presidents in books published a few years after leaving office. Not Dick – he has been extremely visible on news programs, to the point of becoming redundant.
In all of Dick appearances of late, he has sneeringly defended his point of view on torture and warns us about unknown, invisible evildoers, while implying that Obama isn’t man enough to handle them. Dick’s daughter, Liz, has jumped into the fray, accusing Pres. Obama of siding with terrorists. These commentaries have had a sense of urgency about them, mixed with righteous indignation.
When I hear Dick speak, I wonder how he would sound if he replaced the words “terrorist” and “enemies” with “heart disease” and “respiratory failure”. Is Dick’s struggle against terrorism and defense of torture symbolic of his failing health and the lengths he will go to for more time? I think so. I know what a man sounds like when his pulmonary system has betrayed him. I lost my father to COPD a few months ago, and perhaps I am reading too much into things. My Dad wanted more life and every detail seemed urgent to him. Sometimes he was arrogant about it. Time will tell if I am right or wrong about Dick, but he is certainly behaving like a man at the end of his world.
This is the last paragraph, where I should sew up the hem and offer goodwill to the Cheney family as a woman who had a very sick father, too, but I won’t. The only thing I can offer to the Cheney’s in the way of advice is to step away from the heat when the former Bush administration (and the Republican party) burns their father’s legacy in effigy to save their own hide. You ain’t seen the meaning the meaning of the word ugly yet.
U2 – Until The End Of The World
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